CATL's Chairman Warns That China's Rushed EVs Are Trading Quality for Speed

At an industry conference in Sichuan on September 3, the chairman of the company that supplies nearly a third of the world's electric-vehicle batteries delivered a blunt diagnosis of his own customers: cars in China are being developed too fast. "Everyone is competing on speed, on specifications, on price — development cycles keep getting shorter," said Zeng Yuqun, who founded and runs CATL, at the World Power Battery Conference in Yibin. "But this comes at the cost of product quality and consumer trust." His keynote, quoted at length by Yicai, the Shanghai-based business daily, was the most prominent entry in a widening industry argument over the "rushed car" (速成车) — a term that has itself been trending across Baidu since his speech made headlines.

The numbers Zeng cited frame the dilemma. In the first half of this year, China sold more than 7.4 million new-energy vehicles, close to half of all cars sold in the country; Chinese firms hold seven of the top ten slots in global power-battery installations, with more than seventy percent of the market. Yet the same boom, he said, has compressed the time from drawing board to showroom from the traditional four and a half years to 18–24 months, and in some cases to twelve. A post summarizing the conference noted that he is not a lone voice: Great Wall Motor's Wei Jianjun, Xpeng and Chery executives have all made versions of the same warning. "A proper car cannot be built in under two years," as one recap circulating on Weibo put it — an argument that has spread across the industry's senior ranks.

Why it matters beyond the industry: the development cycle is the quiet engine of China's EV price war, and quality control is its collateral. Zeng's sharpest line, carried in the conference hashtags, was that "some batteries' batch failures are shocking to see" — a remarkable admission in a sector whose global reputation rests on manufacturing excellence. The pattern of promising big and shipping early has caught companies before: the collapse of Dreame's hypercar project, a year after it promised the world's fastest production car, was this site's story in August, and this autumn's launch season has Xiaomi, Huawei and Honor all staging head-to-head events in a market where being late costs more than being unready.

CATL sits oddly in this fight — it sells to nearly every carmaker accelerating the cycle, and its dominance is itself a product of the speed it now warns against. But that is partly the point the chairman was making: the company's brand now rises or falls with batteries it did not choose to rush. "Quality," he told the conference, is the industry's most important keyword — a sentence that would have been unremarkable coming from a regulator, and landed as a rebuke coming from the man who supplies the pack.